King Charles III State Visit Cancelled as Anti-Macron Protests, Strikes Intensify

Protests and strikes against President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial reforms package are now so pervasive the planned state visit by Britain’s King Charles III has been postponed pending conditions in France improving.

King Charles III, who became the monarch of 15 countries worldwide including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand after the death of his mother Elizabeth II last year, was due to make his first state visit to France and Germany from this coming Sunday, per details of the tour released by Buckingham Palace earlier this month.

But the French element of the tour will now not go ahead as planned, as the country has been struck by repeated violent protests and lengthy strikes all aimed at stopping or even bringing down the Macron government. President Macron, for his part, has described himself as a god-like ruler but has otherwise struggled to get his deeply controversial pensions reform bill to pass, and has resorted to using emergency executive powers to push it through. Foreseeably, perhaps, this has intensified protests.

Rioters in Bordeaux, France set the city hall on fire on Thursday night as part of mass protests against the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64. pic.twitter.com/OYf2QGAprc

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) March 24, 2023

Speaking out on the cancellation on Friday, President Macron said it was “common sense” to postpone and that “We would not be serious … to make a state visit in the middle of protests.”

The King’s visit was planned to include a state banquet at the Élysée Palace — it is conceivable such an exceptionally lavish event taking place with riots outside would be bad optics for Emmanual Macron and could be compared by his detractors to the events leading up to the French revolution, and that these considerations may have contributed to the cancellation.

Alluding to this, perhaps, Macron said inviting the British King to France during the protest “would have prompted incident”. Furthermore, King Charles was due to visit the city of Bordeaux, whose town hall was partially burnt by protesters last night.

As the BBC notes, even the French government staff who would have physically rolled out the red carpet for the Kings’ visit are on strike.

Part of the protests against Macron’s plans have been weeks of strikes by garbage collectors, leaving Paris covered in mountains of trash, some of which has been burnt by protesters, contributing to the smell. The Press Association has reported 1,000 trash cans were set alight in Paris yesterday, and in all around a million people marched against Macron on Thursday night.

Yet indicating the degree to which violence was present mainly among the fringes, just 80 people were arrested overnight.

While the cancellation is a blow to both parties given the shared desire to show a united front, Britain’s desire to have good diplomatic relations with France after Brexit, and France’s desire to be a European leader, it is perhaps worst for Macron personally. Having to cancel — at the last minute — a state visit because the protests against your domestic agenda are too bad to ensure the safety of visiting heads of state will dramatically underline internationally the state of his presidency.